Description

Germany's and Italy's belated national unifications continue to loom large in contemporary debates. Often regarded as Europe's paradigmatic instances of failed modernization, the two countries form the basis of many of our most prized theories of social science. Structuring the State undertakes one of the first systematic comparisons of the two cases, putting the origins of these nation-states and the nature of European political development in new light.

Daniel Ziblatt begins his analysis with a striking puzzle: Upon national unification, why was Germany formed as a federal nation-state and Italy as a unitary nation-state? He traces the diplomatic maneuverings and high political drama of national unification in nineteenth-century Germany and Italy to refute the widely accepted notion that the two states' structure stemmed exclusively from Machiavellian farsightedness on the part of militarily powerful political leaders. Instead, he demonstrates that Germany's and Italy's "founding fathers" were constrained by two very different pre-unification patterns of institutional development. In Germany, a legacy of well-developed sub-national institutions provided the key building blocks of federalism. In Italy, these institutions' absence doomed federalism. This crucial difference in the organization of local power still shapes debates about federalism in Italy and Germany today. By exposing the source of this enduring contrast, Structuring the State offers a broader theory of federalism's origins that will interest scholars and students of comparative politics, state-building, international relations, and European political history.

About the author

Daniel Ziblatt is associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University, where he is also faculty associate at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.

Google Play reviews now use Google+ so it's easier to see opinions from people you care about. New reviews will be publicly linked to your Google+ profile. Your name on previous reviews now appears as "A Google User".

Google Play reviews now use Google+ so it's easier to see opinions from people you care about. New reviews will be publicly linked to your Google+ profile. Your name on previous reviews now appears as "A Google User".

Similar

After Yugoslavia is a collection of post-Yugoslav voices reflecting recent developments and trends ught within the Yugoslav successor states since the signing of the Dayton Agreements in autumn 1995. This book offers a distinctive and desirable perspective on the seven successor states, their cultures, politics and identities. It provides an internal perspective on the region and its developments through a multitude of views which are rarely brought into conjunction.

The collection is interdisciplinary in its approach, albeit with an emphasis on contemporary politics. It draws together anthropologists, historians, sociologists, constitutional lawyers, political commentators and other scholars, many of whom have international reputations and are highly regarded in their own disciplines.

What drives party-based Euroscepticism and why are some small parties Eurosceptic, even if they are not located in the margins, whilst other marginal parties are not? What makes mainstream opposition parties careful not to appear Eurosceptic? Is Euroscepticism an aberration of politics, an extreme populist ideology, or just politics as usual?

These are some of the topics explored in Political Parties and Euroscepticism. Drawing on a variety of historical accounts, comparative case studies and textual analysis of over 150 party manifestos, this book examines party-based Euroscepticism as an electoral strategy and offers a dynamic theoretical model for analysis. It uses case studies from three West European countries to examine the role of domestic electoral systems and party location as explanatory variables in the theoretical model. Euroscepticism offers a lifeline to some parties, whilst it sucks the oxygen from others. It is a strategy that pays off only under certain conditions. This book investigates the conditions under which it works and those under which it doesn't.

What are the promises of multinational federalism? What are the issues raised by the presence of several peoples within a federal state? Is federalism an ideal for managing national diversity? Which countries can serve as models and deserve to be carefully examined? And is Europe a good laboratory to explore whether the federal model can be adapted to allow for national diversity? This book offers state of the art reflections on these questions by thirteen leading experts in the field of multinational federalism. It gathers contributions from philosophers, political scientists and jurists dealing with the accommodation of peoples in countries like Belgium, Canada, Europe, Great Britain, India and Spain. The authors examine the institutional design and the formulation of principles governing the political organization of a society when it is constituted by groups of different nationalities.

Autonomy has been widely advocated as a means of managing national diversity, whilst meeting the demands of justice and stability. It comes in a variety of forms, both territorial and non-territorial and spans the categories of secession, confederation, federalism, devolution, local government and cultural self-management. Using the term in a broad way, this book examines its meanings in political and legal theory and its application in a variety of settings in Europe, North America and Asia. Among the issues discussed are: normative theories of self-determination; the definition and boundaries of autonomous communities; secession and its alternatives; the political economy of autonomy; the policy capacity of autonomous governments; legal conceptions of autonomy and the international context.

Political parties are essential for parliamentary democracy, the form of government that prevails in most European states. But how have parties adapted to modern society – not least a new layer of political decision-making in the EU? Should we talk of a crisis of party democracy?

This book reports the findings of a comparative survey of parties in four Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland and Sweden, all EU member states; and Norway, which remains outside the Union. Using original data, it explores how power is exercised within party organisations and their respective parliamentary groups.

Within an analytical framework that envisages a party as a series of delegation relationships, the book illuminates how leaders are chosen, how election candidates are selected, how manifestos are written – and how a party's various elements are co-ordinated. For all the challenges posed by multi-level governance, parties retain much of their capacity for making democracy work.

In a detailed study of the methods of statebuilding as practiced by informal states, Daria Isachenko focuses on Northern Cyprus and Transdniestria, which due to their unrecognized status occupy a politically ambiguous space within the international community, often labelled as de facto states or even weak states. This book investigates how they function under circumstances of non-recognition, using insights from political sociology to provide a conceptual framework capable of analysing the making and development of informal states.

Tracing the historical trajectories of Northern Cyprus and Transdniestria towards unilateral declarations of independence, chapters explore the symbolic and economic dimensions of their statebuilding projects.Particular emphasis is placed on the effects of external support on the internal statebuilding process, challenging the assumption that these informal states are mere geopolitical pawns of their sponsors. The author instead argues that they are far from being isolated, but are active participants in international politics.

This volume intends to make sense of the current 'puzzle' that international parliamentary institutions represent. Their rapid growth in numbers and under a diversity of forms in the post-Cold War emerging new order is a worldwide phenomenon, even if its first expression dates back to the end of the 19th century. Their objectives vary from creating a permanent institutional structure for the peaceful settlement of disputes to promoting transparency in international politics, including the reinforcement of civil society participation in regional integration schemes. Are these goals kept nowadays? Are they being achieved? Which means and interests define the work within these assemblies? The three parts of the book include analyses of supranational and non-supranational regional parliaments and the specific case of the inter-regional relations established by the European Parliament.

Tracing both economic and political developments through the prism of history as well as more recent events, this book casts new light on the role of communist history in setting the different regional successes in post-communist transition. It challenges the dominant view that all communist systems were the same, and differing from existing books on the subject, it provides a full account of how certain variations in the functioning of the communist political and socio-economic systems in East Central Europe and the Balkans defined the different modes of power transfer of states in the two regions and their subsequent pathways following the fall of communism. The author also develops a new angle on national and regional post-communist pathways by exploring varying levels of success in both post-communist political and economic reforms as well as the ability of particular states to (re)establish close political ties with the West, especially the EU, and secure necessary foreign assistance for post-communist reform.

Unobtrusive, factual and ultimately convincing, with a foreword written by the leading world scholar in the twentieth-century history of Central and Eastern Europe, Professor Richard Crampton from Oxford, this volume is an excellent contribution to existing literature on democratic reform in the countries of post-communist Europe.

Why do policy actors create branded terms like Big Society and does launching such policy ideas on Twitter extend or curtail their life? This book argues that the practice of hashtag politics has evolved in response to an increasingly congested and mediatised environment, with the recent and rapid growth of high speed internet connections, smart phones and social media. It examines how policy analysis can adapt to offer interpretive insights into the life and death of policy ideas in an era of hashtag politics.

This text reveals that policy ideas can at the same time be ideas, instruments, visions, containers and brands, and advises readers on how to tell if a policy idea is dead or dying, how to map the diversity of viewpoints, how to capture the debate, when to engage and when to walk away. Each chapter showcases innovative analytic techniques, illustrated by application to contemporary policy ideas.

What does a deliberative democracy look like in a divided society? What obstacles and opportunities are there for the promotion of a deliberative democracy at the institutional and citizen levels? Through case-analysis and cross-sectional assessment of nine countries, this unique and important collection provides a detailed and insightful exploration into these problematic questions. A roll call of leading experts on deliberative democracy explores some of the most deeply divided societies in the world today, ranging from Northern Ireland to Nigeria and Belgium to the Basque Country, specifying conditions under which deliberative democracies could realistically emerge in unpropitious contexts. This collection is recommended reading for students and scholars of deliberative democracy and of politics in divided societies.

You can read books purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.

eReaders and other devices

To read on e-ink devices like the Sony eReader or Barnes & Noble Nook, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Please follow the detailed Help center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.